But this wasn’t my business.

‘Well,’ I said, ’you may find you have to tell Jane.  Perhaps, in a way, you owe it to Jane to tell her.  But the essential thing is that you should tell your parents.  That’s quite necessary, of course.  And you should do it at once—­this evening, directly you get home.  Every minute lost makes the thing worse.  I think you should catch the next train back to Potter’s Bar.  You see, what you say may affect what is in to-morrow morning’s papers.  This thing has to be stopped at once, before further damage is done.’

She looked at me palely, her hands twisting convulsively in and out of each other.  I saw her, for all her seven or eight-and-twenty years, as a weak, frightened child, ignorant, like a child, of the mischief she was doing to others, concerned, like a child, with her own troubles and fears and the burden on her own conscience.  I was inclined now to believe in that push.

‘Oh,’ she whimpered, ’I daren’t....  All this time I’ve said nothing....  How can I, now?  It’s too awful ... too difficult ...’

I looked at her in silence.

‘What’s your proposal, then?’ I asked her.  I may have sounded hard and unkind, but I didn’t feel so; I was immensely sorry for her.  Only, I believe a certain amount of hard practicality is the only wholesome treatment to apply to emotional and wordy people.  One has to make them face facts, put everything in terms of action.  If she had come to me for advice, she should have it.  If she had come to me merely to get relief by unburdening her tortured conscience, she should find the burden doubled unless she took the only possible way out.

She looked this way and that, with scared, hunted eyes.

’I thought perhaps ... they might be made to think it was an accident ...’

‘How?’

’Well, you see, I could tell them that he’d left the house—­Mr. Gideon, I mean—­before Oliver ... fell.  That would be true.  I could say I heard Mr. Gideon go, and heard Oliver fall afterwards.  That’s what I thought I’d say.  Then he’d be cleared, wouldn’t he?’

‘Why haven’t you,’ I asked, ’said this already, directly you knew that Gideon was suspected?’

‘I—­I didn’t like,’ she faltered.  ’I wanted to ask some one’s advice.  I wanted to know what you thought.’

‘I’ve told you,’ I answered her, ’what I think.  It’s more than thinking.  I know.  You’ve got to tell them the exact truth whatever it is.  There’s really no question about it.  You couldn’t go to them with a half true story ... could you?’

‘I don’t know,’ she sighed, pinching her fingers together nervously.

’You do know.  It would be impossible.  You couldn’t lie about a thing like that.  You’ve got to tell the truth....  Not all you’ve told me, if you don’t want to—­but simply that you pushed him, in impatience, not meaning to hurt him, and that he fell.  It’s quite simple really, if you do it at once.  It won’t be if you leave it until the thing has gone further and Gideon is perhaps arrested.  You’d have to tell the public the story then.  Now it’s easy....  No, I beg your pardon, it’s not easy; I know that.  It’s very hard.  But there it is:  it’s got to be done, and done at once.’